Wilson spends much of his movie dogging Moore just as Moore dogged General Motors CEO Roger Smith in his 1989 film "Roger & Me." He says he just wants 45 minutes to discuss how two guys from the Midwest could see the world so differently. Moore, understandably put off by the title of Wilson's project, refuses to talk to him.

Of course, Moore has done much to earn this irksome homunculus. His distortions don't begin to rival those of, say, Fox News or the Bush administration, but he does tend to bulldoze over inconvenient facts in the service of his arguments. In "Fahrenheit 9/11," for example, he strongly implies that the war in Afghanistan was motivated by Unocal's desire to build a natural gas pipeline, a theory that's been discredited by analysts across the political spectrum, and he paints prewar Iraq as an Edenic land of kite-flying children.

Wilson cleverly and persistently calls Moore on some of his misrepresentations. He visits the bank where Moore got a free gun in "Bowling for Columbine" and finds out that it doesn't ordinarily hand out weapons on-site. The guns were usually kept in a vault 300 miles away, but the bank's employees said Moore had pressured them to give him his gun in person and on camera. He told them he was working on a film about unusual businesses.

Wilson also tracks down a soldier who lost his arms in Iraq and who appears in "Fahrenheit 9/11" via footage taken by a news crew. An avid supporter of the war, the soldier is furious about being drafted into Moore's movie. "I don't want any part of your propaganda," he says. "No one sent me over there. I sent myself over there. We all knew there's a chance we could get killed. We're not idiots."

For all his outrage over Moore's tactics, though, Wilson is just as given to cheap shots and unearned conclusions. Accusing Moore of lionizing Canada, he goes there and finds two inarticulate street kids to represent it. There's a long, pointless segment in which he profiles two men who've started their own small businesses in Moore's hometown of Flint, Mich., which is apparently supposed to demonstrate that Moore exaggerated the area's economic hardship. Of course, a person could have also found a few thriving entrepreneurs during the Great Depression -- it proves exactly nothing about the larger economic reality.

Wilson seems to pride himself on his open mind, but he often seems either naive or willfully blind. That's true in person, as well. Over drinks at the Intercontinental on Saturday night, I suggest to Wilson that, although Moore might have erred in using an unsuspecting and unwilling amputee to illustrate his point, things in Iraq are indeed awful, and many soldiers feel marooned and furious. A voluble chain-smoker with platinum streaks in his hair, Wilson replies, "I've talked to tons of soldiers who say it's like a Fourth of July parade every time they roll into town." Perhaps because of all the explosions.

Most irritating of all is Wilson's titular accusation. Part of the political fallout from 9/11 has been the emergence of cultural vigilantes who've taken it upon themselves to defame the insufficiently jingoistic. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1962 book "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote of American intellectuals' historic ambivalence toward their country and of "the tension between protest and affirmation that had been most often associated with great achievement." In trying to root out the element of protest in national thought -- all while paying insincere lip service to their respect for dissent -- people like Wilson make themselves the enemies of intellect. They become the enforcers and purveyors of the most squalid philistinism.

In his movie, Wilson seems genuinely disturbed by the degree of polarization of America. He leaves an interview with right-wing Jacobin David Horowitz unnerved by Horowitz's shrillness. Part of him wants to broker a truce between the warring Americas that Herb Meyer speaks of. There seems to be a struggle in him between decency and demagogy.

Ultimately, though, demagogy wins.

Recent Stories